I’ve been making e-books for the past couple of years now. As with several of the publishing-related skills I’ve acquired, it’s been an essentially self-taught process, born out of my involvement with Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and out of necessity. I’ve made mistakes along the way, and I daresay I still have a few things to learn, but I’m feeling sufficiently comfortable with my level of experience that it’s probably worth passing some pointers on, for them as might be interested in this newfangled digital technology. (It helps, also. to have a nitpicky inclination and a patient temperament, but I can’t really assist on that score.)

So, my Five Rules For Happy E-booking:

1. Use Calibre

Calibre is a shareware e-book management tool, developed by Kovid Goyal. It’s been around a while, and it’s a fairly mature program, but there are still updates released every so often. It’s a…

Hi Ophelia,
From what I’ve heard, Smashwords works fine. I just do things the way I do because we (ASIM) originally needed to generate e-books which we’d sell only from our own site, not from one of the big e-book sales sites. But I’ve certainly found it useful to know how to get a particular effect–while the automatic converters (for Kindle and Smashwords etc) are technically good, they don’t necessarily do things exactly the way you want them to.